It is a rainy Christmas Day in San Diego and I am not thinking about gifts a much as I am thinking about how children are gifted…
And how we have tried so hard for so long to defy NCLB’s gravitational pull toward the homogenization of our curriculum by stubbornly celebrating the multiple intelligences…
And how we might be even more effective when we return to school in January if we can continue to recognize the many ways that children can be gifted. Or intelligent.
And how we so casually recite the 7 intelligences as if we were naming the days of the week or Disney’s dwarfs: verbal, mathematical, spatial, musical, interpersonal, Saturday, intrapersonal, kinesthetic, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey…
And how we have come to accept Gardner’s word as Gospel when it comes to intelligence and how we weave his word into our work-- or we do not…
And how the newest “intelligence” that Howard Gardner identifies—the one that we haven’t quite figured out how to recognize (let alone celebrate)-- is the one he simply calls the spiritual intelligence…
And how sometimes I think that the spiritual intelligence is the strongest of my intelligences, and sometimes I can hardly find it at all…
And then on this rainy Christmas Day when I should be playing with my daughter’s new PSP I am instead reflecting on my students and my colleagues and my family and what a collective gift they are to me….
And so, for the moment, I resolve to seek the gifts we find in others and continue the journey to wherever the spiritual intelligence might take me...
And I wonder where your gifts have taken you.
(Simultaneously Posted on El Milagro Weblog).
Kevin Riley
[cross-posted at the old LeaderTalk blog (including comments)]